Trust

Why we show accuracy

A dot on a map is a claim. Without its age and its error, you cannot tell a confident claim from a guess — and the two call for completely different responses.

Three situations, one screen

It is 10pm. Your sixteen-year-old's dot has not moved for forty minutes, and it is two streets from where they said they would be. In every other family tracker, that screen looks exactly the same whether:

They are exactly there

A fix from ninety seconds ago, accurate to eight metres. Nothing is wrong.

The phone died forty minutes ago

The dot is where they were, not where they are. They could be anywhere within a half-hour's walk, and you have no idea which direction.

Android stopped the app

Battery optimisation quietly killed background location. The phone is fine, the teenager is fine, and the app will not update again until they open it.

The first needs nothing. The second might need a phone call to a friend's parent. The third needs a setting changed, tomorrow, calmly. A product that renders all three identically has not given you information — it has given you a picture and left you to invent the meaning.

What we show instead

Every position in Orbities carries three things, on every surface, with no exceptions:

How old it is. And the verb changes with it — “Updated 2 minutes ago” becomes “Last seen 40 minutes ago”. One word, doing an enormous amount of work.
How accurate it was. ±8 m and ±900 m are both a dot on a map, and they are not the same claim. The map draws the uncertainty as a circle rather than hiding it inside a pin.
How confident we are. Derived from the fix, the phone's own report of its state, and whether it has been reporting as promised.

And when confidence is low, Orbities says which of the dozen possible causes it is — the permission, the battery setting, the airplane mode, the clock — rather than dimming the dot and leaving you to guess.

Why nobody else does this

Because uncertainty looks like weakness in a demo. A competitor's screenshot shows four crisp dots on a clean map; ours shows four dots, two of them with a halo and one labelled “reduced accuracy — precise location is off”. Theirs is a better screenshot. Ours is a better answer to the question you actually have at 10pm.

The cost of hiding it is paid later, and by the family: either in a panic over a flat battery, or — much worse — in a family that has learned the app cries wolf and stops looking at it. A tracker people have stopped believing is worse than no tracker, because it was bought instead of a habit.

Where to see it

It is on the front page — the demonstration card shows the truth line on a live example. Or read how the rest of the product is built, which follows from the same idea: say what is actually true, including when it is inconvenient.